Open Sesame – Chapter 7, Act 3, Strip 23

Well, experience is a great thing in general, and usually it’s much better to have more of it, rather than less. That’s not to say, however, that there aren’t any, if comparatively minor, drawbacks at all to being very experienced, and K’ip and Si’ri are in the process of illustrating one of them: sometimes, your wealth of experience with all possible variations of a situation can block your view of the obvious. >_>

Although the obvious might not even be all that obvious in this case…in a fantasy world like this, secret doors working on the simple push/pull principle might very well constitute the minority, compared to those that use more convoluted mechanisms, even if they’re probably still more common than any single specific one of those convoluted choices. And then, of course, there is the Game Master effect, also known as non-arbitrary arbitrariness – if K’ip and Si’ri had tried pushing/pulling first, that in itself might have altered the universe around them in a way that suddenly made the secret doors have a completely different, more complicated opening mechanism.

And, yeah, on the inside there was a grandfather clock standing in front of the passageway. A device that, strictly speaking, is a bit too technologically developed to neatly fit the mold of a typical fantasy world…but it’s got such an iconic stature in this role that I just couldn’t resist the temptation. Come on! A secret passageway leading into an old castle? How could it not end behind a grandfather clock? At most, I could have replaced it with an hourglass or water clock…